A Preliminary XBMC Image is now Available for Wandboard, GK802

Yesterday, Stephan Rafin left a message on Wandboard mailing list saying he had released a preliminary (Linux) XBMC image that can run on Wandboard Quad development board. GPU and VPU acceleration work, but this is still work in progress, so if you want something that just works, this is not for you. But if you just want to give it a try, it should work on any hardware based on Freescale i.MX6, such as Wandboard Dual or GK802 mini PC, with some minor modifications.

If you’ve got a Wandboard Quad board, the installation is straightforward from a Linux machine:

Where /dev/sdx is the sdcard device (e.g. /dev/sdc). You can check with lsblk command.

If you’ve got a machine running Windows only, you can use Win32DiskImager for step 3.

Now insert the microSD card in the EDM module’s SD card slot, and you can run XBMC. The board will get an IP address from DHCP, and you can access the board via SSH or the serial console with root/xbmcpoc as username and password.

There are some known issues.limitations:

SPDIF and analog audio output are disabled for now, so that XBMC selects HDMI for audio output.

I mentioned XBMC should also work on other i.MX6 platforms such as Wandboard Dual, or GK802 / Hi802 mini PC. I haven’t had time to try it, but in theory, you can either the three steps for Wandboard Quad, and update uboot and possibly the VPU firmware file (if not using i.MX 6Quad) for your hardware, or more simple, use an existing working (Linux) SD card for your device, and replace the rootfs with the content from rfs_wand.tgz. If your device is not based on the quad core version of i.MX6 SoC, you may also want to save the content of /lib/firmware/vpu/ to copy it back, after updating the rootfs.

Regarding GK802, I began my imx6 XMBC porting on this device and have already released images ready to use for this target. The latest image for GK802 is here : http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=161793&pid=1444576#pid1444576
Contrary to the wandboard image it is not based on fsl BSP V4.0.0 but on fsl BSP V1.1.0. Yet, the final result for end user is quite similar. Besides, in this GK802 image, wifi works fine (with networkmanager plugin in xbmc to configure it)
There is one BIG warning before using it : GK802 has overheating issues when you really use the GPU (benchmarks or XBMC GUI for instance). So before trying this image I highly recommend to add a heatsink on the case or even better to open the device, remove the thermal pad and add a heatsink on the soc itself…
In any cases, there is a thermal protection which turns screen black and reduce frequency to cool the core quickly in case of overheating so you should not damage your device (one user reported irreparable damages but with another kernel of his own, not with my image) but I really recommend to add a decent cooling solution on GK802 as it is poorly designed regarding this aspect…